During the late sixties and early seventies a group of writers, artists, and intellectuals gathered to play a drawing game called Exquisite Corpse. The group included: Michael Craig-Martin, David Hockney, Catherine Carver, Bruce Chatwin. Andrew Lord, Barry Flanagan, Stephen Spender, Suzi Gablik, Frank Kermode, Linda Nochlin, Tamar Garb, Tim Adès, Anne Wollheim, Patrick Procktor …. Meeting at Nikos Stangos and David Plante’s small Battersea flat, the group took up a game invented in Parisian Surrealist circles in 1925. To play, each participant takes turns drawing parts of a human figure on a sheet of paper. The first player draws the head, then folds the paper to conceal it, and passes the paper to the next player who will draw the torso, hide it, and pass the corpse on for its genitalia to be added. Lastly two more participants will draw the legs and then the feet. In the hands of this exceptionally talented and imaginative cohort, the Corpses defy biological determinism. They feature varied, but generally abundant, sexual and mechanised attributes, unorthodox attitudes to social mores, rough sketching, and exquisite draftsmanship. As a whole Exquisite Corpses presents a parade of fantastical beings charged with the free spirit of the era and invented by some of its most prominent luminaries.
